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By Laurel Rosene
What a wonderful season. The air is fresh, the water cold and glimmering in the sunlight – the river goes along calmly, and then you can hear the crescendo building up around the corner where the rapids start.
These small tributary rivers that only come alive in the Spring for a short while are so alive with movement and take you through the back door of forests, fields and yards of people that live on the banks of the water.
The Carp River is a lovely run. No one would guess that the trickle moving through Kanata’s back yard is such a noble ribbon of life running full throttle all the way to the Fitzroy dam, joining the Mighty Ottawa. It’s the first time I have been out and heard my friends chat about ice on their thigh straps. My feet were freezing in the water that had pooled around them in the bottom of my canoe.
All in all, you could see the folks that border the river kept their livestock fenced about 30-50 ft away from the water. However there was one farm that had terrassed ‘steps’ that went from the back end of the barn right to the river, and the run off from the barn went directly into the water.
Coming out of the Carp and into the Ottawa, rounding the curb of land into Fitzroy Park, I could see the massive dams and the water coming through in white turbulent masses of foam and power to my right. To my left, the water was more than a quarter of the way up the small trees that banked the river here. When I looked at everything around me a picture of the river being a body laid out under the sun, and the trees were its arms reaching up skywards, and today—likely only for a few brief hours under the sun—the trees looked as if they were wearing crystal bracelets made of ice. It was a cool picture. The icelets danced with the sun.